The Last of the Buccaneer Editors

"You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."

So read the sign outside Russy Karanjia's office in Blitz. He passed away on February 1, exactly 67 years after he founded one of India's most powerful publications. He was 95. The tabloid died a few years before him. Karanjia the man would have been touched by the obituaries in the press. Karanjia the editor would have rejected most of them as unfit for publication. "Too reverential," he would have grumbled. "Where's the spice?"

He was the last of the buccaneer editors. "Free, Frank & Fearless," roared our masthead. We were not always fearless. We were sometimes too free for our own good. And we were often obnoxiously frank. But Blitz was always readable, thanks to an editor with an unrivalled instinct for what would make news to an incredibly diverse readership, from a jawan on the Chinese border to striking textile workers in Mumbai. A genius who gave some of Indian journalism's greatest names their first break, or a platform to build from. That includes R.K. Laxman. Blitz was also the paper where K.A. Abbas ran his legendary Last Page column unbroken for more than 40 years. Though the English tabloid was the oldest, Blitz also appeared in Hindi, Urdu, and Marathi. Karanjia also founded and ran a morning tabloid called The Daily for some years. His daughter Rita ran the high-circulation Cine Blitz.

Blitz was an anarchist's parliament. And we had two of everything. What we did not have on staff, we had in equally eccentric contributors. We had the world's least successful astrologer. The stars he consulted were mostly those dancing around eyes lit up by liquor. Often staffer wrote fanciful forecasts under his name when he passed out from too much stargazing. Karanjia, who pioneered the political astrology beat, would bully him into making predictions (which Karanjia favoured) on who would sweep the elections. When these bombed, he would chew him out: "What sort of astrologer are you? Can't you get anything right?" The shaken oracle would totter off seeking what we at Blitz called Spiritual solace. After one proonged absence the last page of Blitz ran words to the effect "Jupiter may be in the house of Mars, and Saturn in the house of Venus, but it will be be a while before Pandit Astro rolls into the house of Karanja." He was back that afternoon.

Blitz had its own style. Embedded journalism, never. Embellished journalism, ah well, every now and then. Karanjia was above all a great storyteller. He spoke even better than he wrote - and he was an excellent writer. He had a wicked sense of humor, too. He once sent me - underlined and with exclamation marks - an aphorism from Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye: "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."

Yet Blitz carried more racket-busting reports and giant political scoops than anyone else. Chief Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, and Governors were laid low by a paper that had amazing access to everything. Investigations, stings, exposes, almost anything the press now celebrates, first happened with Karanjia. He was also the first editor who took photographs and visuals seriously. Look at their quality in Blitz at a time when most papers ran blotched images where it was impossible to tell Khrushchev from his wife.

He also stood by us when the powerful complained, though sometimes in outrageous fashion. Once a politician, now big at the Centre, called to complain about a damaging - and true - story on his land fraud, run as a "Blitz Exclusive." I walked into Karanjia's cabin in time to hear him tell the man on the phone: "I was away, you know, that story was run by my hot-headed deputy, I must discipline him." I raged at him: "How could you do that? It was your story, not mine. The man will now hate me forever." He was unruffled. "He hates you, anyway, dear fellow, and you don't love him either. I've known him since he was a lad and must maintain some equation with him. I don't see what you're complaining about."

He was an instinctive gambler on big issues: Which way to go on technology? Who would win the elections? What was the Big Idea to back? What could we get Parliament fighting about? Some of his gambles succeeded beyond belief. Some left us gasping in a quagmire. He never sought scapegoats for failures, though (except with the astrologer), always taking personal responsibility for things going wrong. I should know. It never happened during the 10 years I was his deputy chief.

Karanjia brought the April Fool hoax to the Indian press. His biggest April 1 coup came when The Daily's front page announced the sale of The Indian Express to A.R. Antulay. At a time when the Express was, in fact, running a campaign against him. Amidst a chaos of jangling phone lines, furious denials and total bewilderment in the city, an incensed Ramnath Goenka warned he would sue us. Karanjia loved that threat. And he did not mind taking on both powerful and dangerous people. As he told me of one, "Oh I say, if you call him a crook, do put a question mark to it. That helps with the libel stuff, you know."

There were periods when I fought with him every morning, but he always made me laugh by the end of the day. Like when I stopped the practice of the pin-up girl on the Last Page. A handwritten note from Karanjia to me ran: "Dear Sainath, now that we are emulating the Vatican Gazette, do you have any further ideas to perk up the paper

Like its editor, Blitz was internationalist. Countless Indians followed the wars of liberation in Vietnam, Africa and Latin America, through Blitz. His great hero was Fidel Castro (whose photo remained on his desk till the last day he went to office.) The Americans hated him and denounced him as a Soviet stooge.

At the height of the Sino-Soviet hostility, Karanjia managed exclusive interviews with the leaders of both the USSR and China (including a rare meeting with Zhou en Lai.) He also had one with the Pope in the same period. His early interview with Castro, though, was very Blitz. Landing in the confusion of revolutionary Cuba, Karanjia was mistaken for the Indian envoy, an error he did little to correct. Castro held up his hand and waved to the crowds at meetings. "Oh, I was in the doghouse a bit when it came apart," he told me. But Castro's own sense of humour triumphed and Karanjia returned with one of the most important interviews of his life.

Blitz had some superb small town correspondents who, unlike the astrologer, were pretty good at calling elections. For years, it had lakhs of readers, and more of them writing to the editor than in any other paper. Readers who would raise lakhs of rupees for causes ranging from poor children needing costly surgery to funds for Vietnamese freedom fighters. Karanjia, who knew giants and was once called a "chronicler of revolutions, a biographer of revolutionaries," never lost sight of little people. It was he who taught a generation how to make a big story of little people. He was the only editor of a big publication in India who supported the massive textile strike of the early 1980s for the full 19 months it lasted.

No editor was more accessible. Anyone could walk into Blitz - and they often did. From levitating ascetics to poor municipal cleaners complaining about working in the sewers - all could meet the editor directly. No vast security apparatus. Even policemen turning up to serve him with summons would have tea with him and return pretending he was untraceable.

Karanjia's unfailing look at the funny side of everything rubbed off on the rest of us. Blitz never lost its sense of fun even when threatened or attacked physically. This was an office where crank callers were welcome entertainment and those hurling death threats were baffled by the response they got. As my late colleague Habib Joosab told one caller: "No, you cannot kill us Mondays or Tuesdays. Those are our press days, don't you know we're busy?"

The staff were his extended family. As patriarch, he could yell at us. Those yelling back were generously tolerated. No one was victimized. To know this man was to love him.

In the mid-1990s, long after I had left the job, he had an accident that damaged his memory. At the hospital I was told he was not recognizing anyone. In his room he greeted me with: "Good evening, Sainath. Have you put the paper to bed? You know I hate going late." I hadn't the heart to remind him I had left Blitz ages ago. I assured him all had been done. Here was a man who, when he had forgotten almost everything, remembered he was a journalist and an editor. Nothing could erase that identity.

Discrimination for dummies: V 2008 [19th jan,08]

A signal achievement of the Indian elite in recent years has been to take caste, give it a fresh coat of paint, and repackage it as a struggle for equality. The agitations in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and other such institutions were fine examples of this. Casteism is no longer in defensive denial the way it once was. ("Oh, caste? That was 50 years ago, now it barely exists.") Today, it asserts that caste is killing the nation - but its victims are the upper castes. And the villains are the lower orders who crowd them out of the seats and jobs long held by those with merit in their genes.

This allows for a happy situation. You can practise casteism of a visceral kind - and feel noble about it. You are, after all, standing up for equal rights, calling for a caste-free society. Truth and justice are on your side. More importantly, so are the media. Remember how the AIIMS agitation was covered?

The idea of 'reverse discrimination' (read: the upper castes are suffering) is catching on. In a curious report on India, The Wall Street Journal, for instance, buys into this big time. It profiles one such upper caste victim of 'reverse discrimination' with sympathy. ("Reversal of Fortunes Isolates India's Brahmins," Dec. 29, 2007.) "In today's India," it says, "high caste privileges are dwindling." The father of the story's protagonist is "more liberal" than his grandfather. After all, "he doesn't expect lower-caste neighbours to take off their sandals in his presence." Gee, that's nice. They can keep their Guccis on.

A lot of this hinges, of course, on what we like to perceive as privilege and what we choose to see as discrimination. Like many others, the WSJ report reduces both to just one thing: quotas in education and jobs. No other form of it exists in this view. But it does in the real world. Dalit students are routinely humiliated and harassed at school. Many drop out because of this. They are seated separately in the classroom and at mid-day meals in countless schools across the country. This does not happen to those of "dwindling privileges."

Students from the upper castes do not get slapped by the teacher for drinking water from the common pitcher. Nor is there much chance of acid being thrown on their faces in the village if they do well in studies. Nor are they segregated in hostels and in the dining rooms of the colleges they go to. Discrimination dogs Dalit students at every turn, every level. As it does Dalits at workplace.

Yet, as Subodh Varma observes (The Times of India, December 12, 2006), their achievements in the face of such odds are impressive. Between 1961 and 2001, when literacy in the population as a whole doubled, it quadrupled among Dalits. Sure, that must be seen in the context of their starting from a very low base. But it happened in the face of everyday adversity for millions. Yet, the impact of this feat in terms of their prosperity is very limited.

The WSJ story says "close to half of Brahmin households earn less than $100 (or Rs.4000) a month." Fair enough. (The table the story runs itself shows that with Dalits that is over 90 per cent of households.) But the journalist seems unaware, for example, of the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Which says that 836 million Indians live on less than Rs.20, or 50 cents, a day. That is, about $15 a month. As many as 88 per cent of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (and many from the Other Backward Classes and Muslims) fall into that group. Of course, there are poor Brahmins and other upper caste people who suffer real poverty. But twisting that to argue 'reverse discrimination,' as this WSJ story does, won't wash. More so when the story admits that, on average, "[Brahmins] are better educated and better paid than the rest of Indian people."

Oddly enough, just two days before this piece, the WSJ ran a very good summary of the Khairlanji atrocity a year after it occurred. That story, from a different reporter, rightly suggests that the economic betterment and success of the Bhotmange family had stoked the jealousy of dominant caste neighbours in that Vidarbha village. But it ascribes that success to India's "prolonged economic boom which has improved the lot of millions of the nation's poorest, including Dalits." Which raises the question: were other, dominant caste groups not gaining from the "boom?" How come? Were Dalits the only "gainers?"

As Varma points out, 36 per cent of rural and 38 per cent of urban Dalits are below the poverty line. That's against 23 per cent of rural and 27 per cent of urban India as a whole. (Official poverty stats are a fraud, but that's another story.) More than a quarter of Dalits, mostly landless, get work for less than six months a year. If half their households earned even $50 a month, that would be a revolution.

Let us face it, though. Most of the Indian media share the WSJ's 'reverse discrimination' views. Take the recent Brahmin super-convention in Pune. Within this explicitly caste-based meeting were further surname-based conclaves that seated people by clan or sub-group. You don't get more caste-focussed than that. None of this, though, was seen as odd by the media. Almost at the same time, there was another high-profile meeting on within the Marathas. That is, the dominant community of Maharashtra. The meeting flatly demanded caste-based quotas for themselves. Again, not seen as unusual.

But Dalit meetings are always measured in caste, even racist, terms. This, although Dalits are not a caste but include people from hundreds of social groups that have suffered untouchability. The annual gathering in memory of Dr. B R Ambedkar on December 6 in Mumbai has been written of with fear. The damage and risks the city has to stoically bear when the noisy mass gathers. The disruption of traffic. The threat to law and order. How a possible exodus looms of the gentle elite of Shivaji Park. (In fear of the hordes about to disturb their polite terrain.) And of course, the sanitation problem (never left unstated for it serves to reinforce the worst of caste prejudice and allows 'us' to view 'them' as unclean).

But back to the real world. How many upper caste men have had their eyes gouged out for marrying outside their caste? Ask young Chandrakant in Sategaon village of Nanded in Maharashtra why he thinks it happened to him last week. How many higher caste bastis have been torched and razed in land or other disputes? How many upper caste folk lose a limb or even their lives for daring to enter a temple?

How many Brahmins or Thakurs get beaten up, even burnt alive, for drawing water from the village well? How many from those whose "privileges are dwindling" have to walk four kilometres to fetch water? How many upper caste groups are forced to live on the outskirts of the village, locked into an eternal form of indigenous apartheid? Now that's discrimination. But it is a kind that the WSJ reporter does not see, can never fathom.

In 2006, National Crime Records Bureau data tell us, atrocities against Dalits increased across a range of offences. Cases under the Protection of Civil Rights Act shot up by almost 40 per cent. Dalits were also hit by more murders, rapes and kidnapping than in 2005. Arson, robbery and dacoity directed against them — those went up too.

It's good that the molestation or rape of foreign tourists (particularly in Rajasthan) is causing concern and sparking action. Not so good that Dalit and tribal women suffer the same and much worse on a colossal scale without getting a fraction of the importance the tourists do. The same Rajasthan saw an infamous rape case tossed out because in the judge's view, an upper caste man was most unlikely to have raped a lower caste woman.

In the Kumher massacre which claimed 17 Dalit lives in that State, charges could not be framed for seven years. In a case involving a foreign tourist, a court handed down a guilty verdict in 14 days. For Dalits, 14 years would be lucky. Take contemporary Maharashtra, home to India's richest. The attention given to the Mumbai molestation case - where 14 arrested men remained in jail for five days after being granted bail - stands out in sharp contrast to what has happened in Latur or Nanded. In the Latur rape case, the victim was a poor Muslim, in Nanded the young man who was ghoulishly blinded, a Dalit. The Latur case was close to being covered up but for the determination of the victim's community.

The discrimination that pervades Dalit lives follows them after death too. They are denied the use of village graveyards. Dalits burying their dead in any place the upper castes object to could find the bodies of their loved ones torn out of the ground. Every year, more and more instances of all these and other atrocities enter official records. This never happens to the upper castes of "dwindling privileges." The theorists of 'reverse discrimination' are really upholders of perverse practice. ⊕

P Sainath